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1 Patsy Klaus & Carol B. Kalish, The Severity of Crime 1 (1984)

handle is hein.death/sevcr0001 and id is 1 raw text is: U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin .The Severity of Crime How serious is a murder? Or a rape? Or, for that matter, a petty theft? Do such questions have any meaning? Would their answers have any utility? Implicit judgments about the severity of crime are imbedded in our social insti- tutions. Requiring the death penalty for certain crimes designates them as the most serious that can occur in this society. Crimes labeled felonies are considered more serious than those labeled misdemeanors. Crimes that can incur life sentences are more serious than those that receive prison sentences of only a few years. Still, the seriousness of a crime is by no means clear-cut or immutable. In 1976 the rape of an adult woman was changed from a capital to a noncapital offense. The penalty for an offense in one State may be substantially different from the penalty for the same offense in another State. Even within one jurisdiction, the disparity in the sentences meted out by different judges for the same offense has been repeatedly noted with concern by criminal justice scholars. Much of the impetus behind recent determinate and mandatory sentencing legislation has come from the wish to minimize sentencing disparity. When we speak of crimes such as robbery or burglary, we are speaking of legal categories rather than specific crimes. Although all robberies possess the characteristics necessary to be legally classified as such, they can vary in their particulars to an extraordinary degree. These variations, in all their complexity, seldom find their way into the penal code. They may or may not be taken into consideration by the sentencing judge. This wide range of possibilities within each crime type further confounds the seriousness issue. Robbery, because it involves personal confrontation and force or threat of force, is generally considered more serious than burglary. Yet most people would probably see the loss of several masterpieces in a museum burglary as more serious than the loss of lunch money in a schoolyard robbery. January 1984 This bulletin presents, for the first time, the seriousness scores for the full set of offenses measured in the National Survey of Crime Severity (NSCS), conducted in 1977 as a supplement to the National Crime Survey. The NSCS was designed, developed, and conducted by the Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. It was directed by Dr. Marvin E. Wolfgang with Dr. Robert M. Figlio. A detailed report on the NSCS and its methodological underpinnings is now in preparation. It will be in two volumes and will be more than 1,200 pages in length. In addition, the bureau will publish a series of special reports highlighting the severity scores of various population groups. Criminologists and criminal justice researchers have been interested in methods of determining the seriousness of criminal events for many years. An accurate measure of the seriousness with which society views a broad range of criminal events would be helpful to lawmakers and policymakers. It could provide a measure of the appropriateness of sentencing practices and it could assist in the allocation of scarce criminal justice resources. It could even indicate more accurately than at present whether crime is increasing or decreasing and by how much. The two basic sources of information on the national crime rate are the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and BJS' National Crime Survey (NCS).* In the Crime Index the UCR counts the total number of murders, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries, and thefts reported to the police during the year. Through a survey of households across *See Measuring Crime, BJS Bulletin, February 1981, NCJ-75710. The severity index represents an innovative way of looking at crimes. It points toward priorities and reaffirms basic values. Two areas of crime about which the public is clearly concerned, drug trafficking and white-collar crime, are major program thrusts of the U.S. Department of Justice. More developmental work is needed before a crime rate weighted by the seriousness of the crimes is possible, but the prospects are exciting. One day, perhaps, seriousness scores may be used routinely to investigate whether criminal career patterns involve crimes of an increasingly serious nature. Steven R. Schlesinger Director the Nation, the National Crime Survey collects information on the total number of rapes, robberies, assaults, burglaries, and thefts committed during the year. In computing crime rates and victimization rates from one year to the next, both the UCR and the NCS treat each type of crime as equally important. An increase of 100 pocket pickings affects the crime rate just as much as an increase of 100 murders, and 100 rapes affect the violent victimization rate as much as 100 simple assaults, which can be no more than a verbal threat of physical harm. Intuition says that this is not completely right; 100 pocket pickings are not equal to 100 murders or 100 simple assaults to 100 rapes in the amount of injury they do or in the amount of anguish and fear they create. Clearly murders and rapes should count more, but how much more? Even within a single crime cate- gory, shouldn't certain events count more than others? For example, isn't a robbery in which the victim is shot more serious than one in which the offender is un- armed? How much more serious? It,

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